I first became aware of Jay
Ramsay's work towards the end of 1989. At the time, I was eighteen months
into a two-year stretch of unemployment which was, in fact, aproductive
and fulfilling period of my life. I occupied myself not with sending forth a
pointless stream of speculative letters to indifferent employers, under the
threat of being sanctioned (things were very different back then!), but in
applying for the occasional job I actually wanted; writing; political
activism; esoteric dabbling; dromomaniac football-watching; amateur
psychogeography; hardcore indolence; and editing a magazine, Memes, that published poetry
alongside fiction, artwork and essays.

I was 29. As it says on the back
cover of issue 2, in which Jay's work appears - an excerpt from a sequence,
'Borderlines' - 'if the artistic, the spiritual and the political concern
you, turn to Page One'. The final line of the excerpt reads 'You shall sing,
you shall be song, you shall be praise'. Memes was a heady brew, in hindsight,
with a title that only became a buzz-word (and then a clichˇ) several years
later.

By the time I met Jay, it was 1992
and various twists and turns had brought me to Swindon - by then, a slave to
work and debt. Jay, who lived (and still lives) in nearby Stroud gave classes
on Alchemy at the local FE college. They were sparsely attended but the ideas
would surface, a few years later, in his profound and accessible introduction
to the subject, Alchemy - the art of transformation (Thorsons/Harper
Collins, 1997).

We've been in contact ever since
and I remain impressed by his continued search for a fusion of the artistic,
the spiritual and the political. He is now the author of thirty-five books of
poetry, non-fiction and classic translation. He also works in private
practice as an accredited psychotherapist and healer, and there's a clear
relationship between this calling and his own poetry.

Monuments assembles a generous
selection of work written since the turn of the century. In his preface, Jay
describes this as a 'critical and transitional time' in which 'apparently
reliable systems and authorities dissolve around us, revealing their
transience beside what stands beyond them'. His poetry is intended to
contribute to a transformation which, he believes, will be necessary for the
human race to realise its potential... and maybe, even, to survive at all.

In a helpful note to the poem
'Blessed Unrest', he discusses Andrew Harvey's concept of the 'sacred
activist' and applies it to himself as 'poet-activist'. Apparently, the
sacred activist avoids both 'the solipsism of the mystic on the one hand, and
the self-righteousness and/or burn-out of the secular activist on the other'.
This is, indeed, the strategy
behind his work. Monuments shifts constantly from the spiritual to the
political, sometimes within the very same poem or sequence.

So, at one end of the spectrum, we
have (for example) the sequence 'Anamnesis - the remembering of soul' - which
was written during a residency at St James' Church Piccadilly in 2005-06.
This explores how a contemporary spirituality, free of the accumulations of
dogma, can manifest - and where injustices appear, they do so as if at
distance. But we also have spectacularly angry poems about real-life
injustices, such as the fire that killed around a thousand exploited
garment-workers in Dhaka a few years ago. Here, a radical political note
enters his work, perhaps more strongly than ever before ('Dhaka'):

The blackened windows of the derelict factory

tell the same burnt-out story: it's not people, but
money

that has to come crashing down (...)

But then, a few poems later, we
return to the ecstatic epiphanies that characterise so much of his work in
'St Ives':

All saints, and the souls of the dead

who know that life eternal is inside the breath

say listen to the sea, and surrender to the sense

that takes you beyond form and name and memory,

fathered in your birth and death

by the Father
of the Air (...)

Indeed, Monuments might also be one of
Jay's most explicitly 'Christian' collections, although his take on
Christianity is much closer to the 'creation spirituality' of the radical
theologian, Matthew Fox, than to any mainstream Anglican tradition.

Technically, the writing has an
'instinctive' feel to it, as if the poems were quickly written (albeit by a
highly-experienced poet) and only lightly revised. Whilst this can lead to
the occasional clumsy formulation, typo and non-sequitur, it also lends his
work an unforced quality that is nonetheless deeply artful, as at the
beginning of 'Black Icon':

Christ of the shadow

shiny as a black stone

in your knowing

you gather the darkness

you have mastered

into a sheen like obsidian (...)

Another aspect of his work is an
interest in place. This book displays a global reach in which Iraq,
Bangladesh and Haiti feature alongside London and rural Devon (for example).
However, his work can also deepen into a specific locality, most notably in
one of the highlights of the book, the sequence 'Summerland'. This focuses on
a relatively unknown spiritual site - the parish church of St. Martin's in
the village of North Stoke, just north of Bath - and a history that reveals
itself through quiet attention ('Romano'):

and all our ancestors we've never met

standing behind us, like these walls

scrolling back through decades, centuries

bearing our story.

Having been in contact with Jay
and his work for a quarter of a century - and because, to some extent, we
share a common origin in the counter-culture of the Eighties - I can't
approach his writing without thinking of our similarities and differences. We
certainly share an interest in place or, perhaps more accurately, places - I don't believe that
it's possible to maintain a 'poetry of place', in traditional terms, in an
era in which every place, literally, penetrates and infuses every other by
way of contemporary technology and media. Today's world, more than ever, is
like a hologram in which each part reflects the whole, and the degree of
accessibility to other places, without leaving one's own city or even one's
own home, would have been unimaginable even in the Eighties. Much of our work
derives from a relationship with the places we encounter - whether directly
or indirectly - although, whereas Jay's response to these places is motivated
by a desire for transformation, perhaps I'm more of an observer and fl‰neur.

At times, we can almost write the
same poem. I was amused to find that his 'Page 360', which is addressed to an
anonymous Page Three model in The Sun, covers almost identical
territory to my poem 'Pose' in Aphinar (Waterloo Press, 2012). My poem
(inspired by an erotic calendar I found, believe it or not, on a train)
similarly contrasts the beauty of the female form with the exploitative
context of the photographs. Whereas Jay writes of this woman's 'knickers
innocent as bedroom curtains / draping the goddess' timeless form', the focus
of my piece is on the vulnerability of human beauty when set against infinite
space and the darkness between the stars. Without mutual influence, we've
approached a similar theme from complementary perspectives - teasing feminist
shibboleths perhaps, but from a broadly supportive standpoint.

However, there are also crucial
differences. His vision is perhaps less pragmatic than mine and, at times, he
appears to think of the world in almost Manichean terms. My radicalism seems
tempered in comparison - the anarchist-leaning green of the mid-Eighties has
given way to the 'Scandinavian' socialist I probably was all along at
heart. And that seems radical enough in a land in which the rednecks are
currently on the march, imposing their 'vision' on immigration, criminal
justice and welfare. Jay, by contrast, is so repelled by the 'cold sneer of
command' that he can succumb to caricature. 'Putin' for example, is a
tightly-written poem about a divisive and controversial figure but, in its
concentration on Putin's 'reptilian' features ('the suit and tie like lizard
skin') it fails to take into account that Russia has, understandably, felt
itself encircled and encroached upon by an organisation (NATO) that in its
post-Cold War persistence has helped to create the very threat that it now
seeks to counter.

Second, there is an ambivalence
about the city and the 'works of man' that is typical of Eighties radicalism.
I recall various debates about 'greening the city' or even vacating it
altogether to return to a more 'authentic' existence on the land. Jay doesn't
fall into that camp but when, for example, he writes about 'Leaving Brussels'
what he highlights are not the sights and pleasures of that intriguing city
(as I'm sure I would) but 'the concrete bridges and towers/polytechnic
buildings and identical cars'. Rarely, in fact, does he celebrate
metropolitan life in this collection. In 'La Maison De Dieu', a striking poem
written in response to 9/11, he expresses his horror at the sight of those
'who chose to die / in a clean plummeting of air' but he is also critical of
the World Trade Centre itself, describing it as the 'Babel of its own
security'. To some extent, I shared this distrust in the Eighties. Now,
however, I think of the more-affluent large cities, at least, primarily as
sites of human flourishing. Globally, moreover, the movement to cities is
encouraging the education of women and a reduction in the birth-rate - the
one thing that might save our species (and innumerable others) in the long
run.

Finally, there's a difference
between Jay's clear sense of election to the role of 'poet' and my image of
myself as a human being who spends time, occasionally, writing and a
proportion of that time writing poetry - with poetry appealing, not so much
from a sense of election, but because it offers me a single space in which I
can address my multiple concerns. The extent to which someone who chooses to
write and publish their poetry decides to adopt a poetic identity is probably dependent
on a number of factors - societal considerations are paramount, but it might
also have something to do with how keen they are to act out that role in
public. How well they do so depends upon the person concerned but, in
principle, I'm wary of anyone who is too willing to call themselves a 'poet'
(or, at worst, 'the poet' as if they were the only one of their kind in
existence) - they have to win me over, as Jay did from the beginning, and
it's not a road I can ever imagine myself following.

Overall, then, his approach is a
more messianic one and in this, perhaps, it's also closer in spirit to the
radical Eighties counterculture that first brought us into contact. He has
stayed faithful to his original vision throughout, with total integrity,
whilst it has also continued to evolve and adapt to present-day realities.
And so, in his particular 'place' in the poetic ecology - undervalued by both
the 'mainstream' and the 'avant-garde' alike, for different reasons - Jay
continues to work towards a benign, yet all-encompassing transformation via
the medium of poetry. It is a lifework that I shall continue to follow with
interest and admiration.